Ditto for changing to control with Alex's method above. At first I thought you might be able to select both the 'command key acts as control key' check box and the 'fn key acts as control key' but that didn't seem to work. Unfortunately I wasn't able to get it to work another way. You have to explicitly define every command you want to use fn for and mapping to control and then fn is really hacky. There are obvious drawbacks to this approach. Then save the file ~/Library/KeyBindings/DefaultKeyBinding.dict with the contents Īfter you logout and log back in you should be able to use fn-c to copy etc.

First check the function key acts as control key box in Double command. The other modification necessary is changing the bundle identifier that Karabiner uses to identify which window we are talking about.I was able to get this to work by using a combination of DoubleCommand and jtbandes hint from here. Firstly, because I’m using a terminal called kitty, you’ll see that in the description and title sections. There are only a couple things you might need to change for your use case. Now copy and paste the following JSON into the new file: You can name it whatever you like - but add a. Now you can open your text editor of choice and create a new file inside ~/.config/karabiner/assets/complex_modifications. Once you’ve installed Karabiner, open it and run it.

Change Caps Lock to Control only in your terminal application.

Change Caps Lock to Command in all applications except your terminal application.

Through Karabiner’s “complex modifications” section, we can write a little configuration file which achieves the following goals:

Karabiner (or more specifically, Karabiner-Elements, is a macOS application which emulates a keyboard device, and allows deep customization. I talked about this in a previous blog post, where I used iTerm and some shortcut trickery to send ctrl-codes to my terminal whenever it received command key shortcuts. My HHKB has a Control key where you’d expect to find a Caps Lock key (which is great, by the way), so using a standard Mac keyboard on my laptop is jarring. One of the larger reasons I find myself switching between OSes, and away from macOS in particular, is its inability to play nice with non-standard keyboard layouts.

Osx karabiner